Lineages
Influences on me
Across history, many traditions have approached wisdom by investigating the self. Who is the knower? See for yourself.
Museo Nazionale Romano · Rome
ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ · Know thyself
Source: 1st century CE · excavated at San Gregorio on the Via Appia
Influences
Development & Learning
Integral Theory, Kegan’s book The Evolving Self—a lot of these frameworks have been helpful in making sense of maturity, how I have personally conceptualized my self-identity. Organizing the opportunities and issues that I have faced in a way that makes sense and helps me access the tools I need.
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Books & Works
I distributed hundreds of copies of this all around India for free. The book demonstrates a powerful way of communicating ideas—how cognitive biases affect us—through narratives.
Eliezer Yudkowsky · HPMOR
A novel exploring scientific reasoning, belief revision, and purposeful action through Harry Potter fan fiction.
A friend of mine at Stanford recommended I read it, and I fell in love with the rich philosophy underlying the book: recursion, the self-referential aspects of the mind.
Douglas Hofstadter
A book connecting formal systems, self-reference, music, art, and consciousness.
My mom’s side of the family introduced me to the teachings. I like this direct path towards clarity.
Ramana Maharshi · Society of Abidance in Truth
Self-inquiry through the question of who experiences thought and what the self is.
Organizations
One of the few organizations that seem to understand the limitations of controlling or steering AI. What we need is less top-down control and more of a bottom-up approach.
Organic alignment · Emmett Shear
An organization working on AI alignment and coordination, associated with Emmett Shear.
I helped run the Live Machinery workshop in Blackpool and the Goa residency. I have assisted various projects like AI Safety Camp and the current Interface Alignment Slowathon. I think this is one of the few organizations that are really trying to meet the alignment challenges in a sane way.
Research organization
Research on live theory, human-AI interaction, agency, and coordination; includes work by Sahil and other contributors.
People
The way he writes is something I can learn a lot from. It’s very engaging and manages to communicate a lot.
Michael’s materialistic account of how we hold vascular tension relates really well to my direct experience with meditative practices.
“Thoughts” are patterns of vascular tensionSelected thread · @johnsonmxeAnother thread · @johnsonmxeLanguage as magic spellsPrinciples of VasocomputationAutism as a disorder of dimensionality
Philosophy
Like many other intellectuals, I used to have a meta-ethical perspective that morality is relative to the traditions of a particular group, not a fundamental universal truth. For now, I am of the opinion that morality is neither fundamental nor arbitrary.
Wikipedia
Different forms of moral relativism and the relationship between moral judgments and cultural context.
In college, I thought about determinism, compatibilism, and wondered if we were biological automatons. After looking deeply into the literature, I had to bite the bullet and admit that there was no representation of the libertarian conception of free will that made sense to me. But now I believe that we are neither slaves to fate nor completely free of our karmic debts.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Philosophical accounts of free will, choice, agency, and moral responsibility.
Finitism interests me because infinity and very large numbers can be useful conceptual objects. But the map is different from an instantiation in material reality. Being able to describe something does not mean it is implemented in reality.
Hacker News discussion
A discussion of finitism and the status of infinity in mathematics.
Status & Social Class
Quillette
A reconsideration of Veblen’s account of leisure, consumption, and social status.
Michael O. Church · IndiePF archive
Michael O. Church’s model of competing American class hierarchies, preserved in an archive.
Friends
Personal site
Vatsal Mehra, a friend; personal website.
Personal site
Bhishma Raj, a friend; personal website and writing.
Personal site
Rudra Kabir, a friend; personal website.
Linguistics
YouTube video
A video selected for the linguistics collection; detailed contents have not yet been verified.
The Atlantic
How the meanings of harm-related concepts expand and change in public discourse.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson · Goodreads
How everyday metaphors structure thought, language, and experience.
Sam Bleckley
Why interruption can signal understanding in one conversational culture and disrespect in another.
QRI
I like Qualia Research Institute’s approach towards understanding consciousness and qualia through a mathematical lens.
Qualia Research Institute
Definitions used by the Qualia Research Institute for discussing subjective experience and consciousness.
Spiritual & Contemplative
LessWrong
A practice of attending to a bodily felt sense to discover what an experience means.
YouTube · starting at 3:24
A selected talk by Soryu Forall, starting at 3:24.
Positive Masculinity
Nameless Mountain
A community offering a setting for men’s development and practice.
Young Men Awake
A community focused on young men’s growth and awakening.
Rob Henderson · Substack
An essay about expectations, responsibility, and the development of young men.
Aeon
An essay on the history and cultural meanings of men’s tears.
TPOT
Post-Rationality
QC inspires me to vulnerably post on Twitter. His authentic sincerity shines bright.
Richard Ngo seems to have good taste and integrity in how he conducts himself. I like the way he thinks about agency, and how he is looking for a scale-free theory that does not privilege any level of abstraction.
Meaningness
A model of how subcultures change as creators, followers, and opportunists interact.
Meta-rationality
The role of meaning and purpose in reasoning beyond formal systems.
Ribbonfarm
An essay connecting meaning, reference, and the act of pointing.
The New Atlantis
An essay exploring rationality, magic, and contemporary intellectual culture.
Softmax · Organic alignment
Emmett Shear, cofounder of Softmax, linked here through the organization’s account of organic alignment.
Rationality
Gwern’s rigor and intellectual scholarship are things I deeply admire in his website and deeply researched blog posts.
Julia Galef · LessWrong
Julia Galef’s map of overlapping ideas and communities in the Bay Area.
LessWrong
An introduction to the Twitter post-rationalist scene and its communities.
Slate Star Codex · archived
An archived essay reflecting on suffering, care, and the end of life.
Nate Soares
Essays on moving from guilt-driven motivation toward deliberate, caring action.
Eliezer Yudkowsky · Inadequate Equilibria
How institutional incentives can produce inadequate outcomes, and how to reason about whether one can do better.
Neel Nanda
Keeping room in one’s life for uncertainty, opportunities, and deliberate choices.
ThingMaker · Medium
How shared knowledge and diffuse beliefs about what others think shape social life.
Lucy Keer · Drossbucket
The contrast between decontextualized formal reasoning and context-rich ways of understanding.
Astral Codex Ten
A model of recurring changes in subcultures and their relationship to mainstream culture.
Cyborgism
Generative Ink
Language models considered as simulators and the implications of their training objective.
LessWrong
An approach to human-AI collaboration that explores models as tools for extending thought and agency.
EA and Forecasting
Effective Altruism Forum
A collection on forecasting, uncertainty, and improving predictions.
An EA offshoot I prefer
An interpretation of effective altruism that Aditya prefers, connecting altruism and integral perspectives.
80,000 Hours
Career guidance on the ingredients of satisfying work, including helping others and engaging tasks.
d/acc
Vitalik Buterin
A retrospective on defensive, decentralized approaches to technological development.
Pop-up villages
Palladium
An account of creating Zuzalu as a temporary community and an experiment in living together.
MAPLE
Monastic Academy
A monastic training organization combining contemplative practice and community life.
Sensemaking Communities
Epistemic Experiments
Experiments in knowing, relating, and shared inquiry.
YouTube · starting at 11:38
A selected video segment about sensemaking communities, starting at 11:38.
Consilience Project
How technologies embody values and why design choices are not ethically neutral.
Circling & Authentic Relating
Enter Portal
A community connected to circling and authentic relating.
International Circling Federation
An overview of the former Circling Europe school’s relational practices and five principles, including connection, owning experience, and attending to sensation.
A Short Guide to Stemless
A relational awareness and expression practice that uses direct language and metaphor to name experience, without the usual verbal stems.
Visualization and Explanation
3Blue1Brown · Grant Sanderson
A visual introduction to Euler’s formula through group theory.
Chris Olah and Shan Carter · Distill
How neglected explanation creates research debt, and how exposition makes knowledge easier to understand and build on.
Bret Victor · Worrydream
A talk exploring interactive media that help people think about otherwise difficult ideas.
Bret Victor · Worrydream
An argument for explanations that readers can actively manipulate and explore.
Setosa
Interactive visual explanations of mathematical and statistical ideas.
Chris Olah · colah’s blog
A visual introduction to information, entropy, and communication.
Nicky Case
An interactive game exploring how cooperation and trust evolve through repeated interactions.
Interactive satellite map
An interactive view of satellites and orbital objects around Earth.
Interactive earth visualization
An interactive globe for exploring wind, weather, oceans, and other Earth systems.
Interfaces
Dynamicland
A computing research organization exploring collaborative, spatial, and embodied ways to work with ideas.
Cube Flipper · smoothbrains.net
An exploration of embodied computing, subjective experience, and alternatives to conventional computer interfaces.
Buddhism
Vacha is living an interesting life, and his connection with nature is something I admire and wish to learn from.
Romeo Stevens has an uncanny ability to craft aesthetic, elegant, compressed, concise maps of Buddhism that titillate me.
Berkeley Alembic
A center for contemplative practice, community, and exploration of consciousness.
Zen training centre · South India
A Zen meditation and training center in South India.
Vipassana Centre · Nagarjuna Sagar
A Vipassana meditation retreat center at Nagarjuna Sagar.